How to Disappear Completely

a tale of addiction, obsession, and renewal. chapter one.

i.

You shudder, the tension of consciousness racking your body as the seconds scream past, through spacetime and into oblivion. You muster your will, steady your trembling hands, take a deep lungful of ice blue air. You close your eyes, exhale slowly through your nose. You’re doing it backwards, but it works nonetheless. Relax, you think, you’ve been here before.

Actually, being here before is part of the problem. See, what most people think of when they hear the phrase “déjà vu” is that tip-of-your tongue sensation whereupon you find yourself seeing, hearing, saying something you’re vaguely certain you’ve seen/heard/said before. But that’s not déjà vu. Déjà vu is a living thing, a creature of Hitchcockian horror, not a mere suggestion but an obelisk of absolute certainty, an eyeblink portal to a nightmare prison slung askance down some entropic alleyway where everything is so real as to be constant, happening all at once, over and over, ad infinitum. Déjà vu is a black hole coda punctuated only by the heat death of the universe. Déjà vu is a temporal flight-or-flight response, and yours is running in high gear.

It might be worth mentioning that you’ve been doing a lot of coke, and this on top of a toxic dose of over-the-counter nasal decongestant, so it would be premature to rule out stimulant psychosis as the monster lurking in the folds of your blistered brain. You woke up the day before yesterday in such a state of despair, so completely devoid of all necessary neurotransmitters, that your yawn became a sob not ten seconds into consciousness. You flailed among the twisted bedsheets for your phone. You found it. You called her. Again. And again you got that same, entirely played-out voicemail where she says, “Hello?” like she actually picked up, only to six seconds thereafter say, “Just kidding! Leave one”

What’s even more pathetic: you actually sat there and waited for confirmation that it was just the recording, as if your brain didn’t immediately recognize the lilt of a stifled giggle between “hel-”and “-lo,” didn’t recognize the same Foster the People song playing in the background. You’ve become intimate with the call forwarding habits of her wireless provider: four rings, and a call goes to voicemail. Zero rings, straight to voicemail means her phone is off. One ring means she’s either on “Do Not Disturb” mode or she’s blocked your number—on this you’re not sure, and your attempts to find this information amongst the morass of mobile phone user message boards have generally yielded questions being asked in turn as to why you (or the poor fucker who asked the same question six years ago, and received the same mix of earnest concern and outright mockery your inquires have heaped upon you are asking such a creepy question in the first place.

Any number of rings, full and partial, between one and four mean she saw your name and number appear on her screen, and rather than wait for the call to ring out simply declined it. These are the missed calls that hurt the most: the ones which make it clear she isn’t actually “missing” anything.

You cried some more, that ugly, moaning sort of crying men who aren’t comfortable crying around other people do when they are alone. You shouted at yourself, called yourself names. You pulled it together long enough to call your guy, the one that fell onto the “your friends” side of the fence when it all came crashing down. He didn’t pick up at first, and you could’ve just plunged your hand straight through your own ribcage to pull out the desperation, the shrieking sadness, a teratoma-like thing made of bone, bits of hair, teeth, and a heaping helping of that black bile Aristotle was always so on about. You raided your own medicine cabinet, a fool’s errand if ever there was one. You cracked open one of those Benzedrex decongestant inhalers and swallowed the cotton ball inside, an indescribably foul, absolutely not-edible thing soaked in camphor, menthol, and phenylephrine or some redheaded stepchild of an analog thereof, some mild stimulant-decongestant when you inhale the vapors as directed. Orally, at a dosage some hundreds of times greater than even the most gung-ho of off label recommendations, well, even back in high school you realized you were committing to an altered state of consciousness multiple days in duration. Only now, robbed of the hubris and immortality of youth, does the awareness of commitment come with a tinge of regret.

Just as you were becoming acquainted with the sensation of feeling aware of each and every individual follicle of hair on your head, your phone rang. It wasn’t her; it was your guy, whose name and. number on the screen evoked an equally Pavlovian reaction. You asked him to commit a crime; he responded with an approximate time later in the afternoon that was only fifty minutes short of when he actually showed up at your doorstep with a quarter-ounce of mediocre cocaine.

This, you remind yourself, was the day before yesterday. Today being today, the sensation you are currently experiencing—staring at your phone, trying to figure out if her name, printed over and over in a descending column, is indeed actually all outgoing calls, or if there’s a missed call in there somewhere—is almost certainly psychosomatic. Colorblindness, to wit, is not a frequently reported symptom of cocaine toxicity, but what about the decongestant? Or that law of toxicology wherein the effects of two substances in tandem are greater than the sum of each individually? You try Google Scholar for answers but (déjà vu) there seems to be a dearth in the literature.

The screen of your phone is spiderwebbed with cracks. Your hands shake so badly that you keep dropping it. The first few times it hit your hardwood floors-the ones she discovered under the carpet and wrapped you in her surprisingly powerful arms, waltzing you around the empty room like you had just won the lottery—nothing happened. Only last night did a particularly ugly spill finally shatter the glass. You remember her telling you how phone glass actually fractures a tiny bit each time it endures a shock, little invisible microfractures contributing to the structural weakness that eventually manifests as the seemingly sudden cracked screen. You wonder if that’s what’s been happening to you all this time. You wonder, now that the cracks are beginning to show, if it is too late to put the pieces back together.

Your phone buzzes. It startles you. You drop it. Good job. You stoop to pick it up, note the newest cracks, tendrils that seem to claw up out of the screen and wrap themselves around the frame. You can no longer swipe down to see your notifications drawer, but the latest entry on your recent call list looks at least sort of red. You are dimly aware that you use the phrase “sort of” entirely too much, usually in losing arguments, hills to die on, as if failure is but a matter of degrees. You tap frantically at your screen, embedding crumbs of powdered glass into the pad of your index finger. The tiny, invisible cuts itch and burn vaguely, reminding you how your fingers used to be hardened, immune to such annoyances, back when you still thought music was worth making, when you worked with your hands and played with your hands and she would hold them and rub the roughness of your calluses against the smooth prairie of her face, back before you became a ghost in an empty, silent house with mice in the walls and memories beneath the floorboards.

You tap and tap. It is like a game with no clear objective. You find a pocket of screen in which the digitizer isn’t too damaged to respond. You’re calling. You’re calling her. Again. You curse, try to hang up. You can’t. You hold down the power button on the side of the phone. It feels like holding her head under water, like the time she thought you were being funny and you thought you were being funny, and then you went somewhere else, feeling mocked and betrayed, your paranoiac insecurities manifested, projected, so that nothing would ever be funny again, her nails finally finding purchase in your shampoo-lathered hair, your skull ringing against the side of the tub, listening to the sound of her dressing and fleeing as the water grew cold and shriveled your skin. Now as then, you’re somewhere else. You only notice after the screen goes black that she had said “hello” twice, her tinny digital voice echoing back to you off of each load-bearing wall in the open floorplan she simply adored. It is a small mercy that your rasping, heaving sobs drown this as well.

You don’t measure what goes into the black-bottomed spoon. It’s a lot, but it takes several seconds over the candle to fizzle and dissolve. Good cocaine is water soluble at room temperature; the middling quality justifies the otherwise obscene amount of powder that went in, and then it’s just an unassuming aqueous solution with a residue of sodium bicarbonate or vitamin B12 or whatever the kids are cutting their product with these days around the rim. You draw up the solution into a 0.5cc insulin syringe through a balled-up piece of cotton swab. Your hands shake as you let the air out of the rig and tie off. You shudder, the tension of consciousness racking your body as the seconds scream past, through spacetime and into oblivion. You muster your will, steady your trembling hands, take a deep lungful of ice blue air. You close your eyes, exhale slowly through your nose. You’re doing it backwards, but it works nonetheless. Relax, you think, you’ve been here before.